598
PARTISAN REVIEW
citizen of France and could even be converted to the love of the soil. And
the Jews were so converted - although their conversion has been more
striking in Israel than in France.
Jewish attitudes toward agriculture formed one of the most interesting
and significant debates at the first World Zionist Congress. On one side of
the spectrum was Herzl's progressive ideology that dismissed the idea of
Jewish peasants. In 1896 Herzl wrote: "Those who would attempt to
convert Jews into peasants are committing a truly astonishing error. For
the peasant is a creature of the past. The agrarian question is only a ques–
tion of machinery. The peasant is a type which is on the way to extinc–
tion.... To create new peasants on the old pattern is an absurd and im–
possible undertaking. No one is wealthy or powerful enough to make
civilization take a single step backward ." The first wave of immigrants
might be forced to toil on the land, but only out of sheer necessity: "The
exodus of the Jews will be gradual. The poorest will go first and cultivate
the soil. They will construct roads, bridges, railways. The labor invested
in the soil will enhance its value. The emigrants standing lowest in the
economic scale will be gradually followed by those of the next grade."
But for other founding Zionists , like Max Nordau, Aaron David
Gordon, and Beryl Katznelson, the bond with the land was essential to
Jewish nationhood. Labor on the land was not merely, as Herzl indicated,
a means to "enhance" its value; labor on the land was a means for the
spiritual redemption of a people. Max Nordau dreamt that the Jews
would "irrigate with their sweat and till with their hands a country that is
today a desert, until it again becomes the blooming garden it once was."
The Zionist Aaron David Gordon ringingly condemned the "plague"
that had affected the Jews for countless generations, that is, "the rent be–
tween ourselves and Nature.... W e despise labor, we must realize how
abnormal
we are in this respect, how alien labor has become to the life of
the nation." Just as French nationalists insisted that French nationhood
was founded less on rational Enlightenment principles than on the emo–
tional and physical bonds between the Frenchman and the French earth,
and that the
principle
of
Liberte
was less important in creating a nation than
the
feeling offraternite,
Gordon similarly maintained that Jewish nation–
hood needed to be founded on bonds deeper than political ideology and
historical memory. He dreamed not of an intellectual, religious, or politi–
cal culture but as a culture rooted in the land itself
As if he had been taught the love of the soil and the value of
enracine–
ment
from French right-wing nationalists, this passionate advocate oflabor
and agriculture decried the age-old Jewish distance from the soil: "The
Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned
within city walls these two thousand years.... Labor is not only the force
